ACT are saying they’ve taken over the role of opposition from the National Party. If that is so they need to stop playing silly jokes. Today they issued a press release saying they’re going to create the Nation Building Agency. Which is only one word different from Australia’s Nation Building Authority.

The Cast of Utopia

However the Nation Building Authority never really existed. It only featured in a comedy TV series by the most brilliant Australian satirist ever, Rob Sitch. Rob has had a few brainchildren over the years, and they’ve all been brilliantly funny put downs of media and govt.

Frontline was a series on the making of a nightly current affairs show. The Hollowmen was on the Canberra bureacracy working to guard the Prime Minister’s public image. These two shows were brilliantly cutting, so close to the bone the depts and media they satirised must have felt numb.

The most telling point though was their accuracy, because really, they were true. They showed exactly what went on behind the doors of media shows and govt bureaucracies. One of Rob Sitch’s later shows in the same realistic vein was called Utopia, and it was about the Nation Building Authority.

Maybe Mr Simon Court, ACT’s spokesman on infrastructure who released this news today could check the series out. Rob Sitch stars as Tony, the head of the NBA, who is a well intentioned and intelligent bureaucrat with the interests of the taxpayer at heart. He’s confounded on all sides by game playing politicians, their lackeys and legions of self promoting no-talents leeching off the dept. Not one of them gives a damn for the long suffering taxpayer or the money they’re wasting by the $billions.

Its strange Mr Court doesn’t mention the MBIE, which was something National’s Steven Joyce thought up that was to operate along similar lines. Meant to facilitate private sector govt inter-action, it has turned into a monolithic overpaid overstaffed surging torrent of taxpayer money and does nothing but shackle private enterprise.

It might give you a grant though if you’ve got something politically correct that looks like it will work long enough to give the govt a headline. One presumes Mr Court’s new dept would replace the MBIE, for NZ sure as hell wouldn’t want them both existing at the same time. Below are two cuts from the show Utopia which give you some idea of what we might be in for with ACT’s NBA.

A new NBA logo-

The first project-